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Why PS4 downloads are so slow

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Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#61

Post by namibj »

MBCook wrote: post #52
apenwarr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not quite right. The most common problem with (especially, but not only) DSL is bufferbloat, where you fill up your upload buffers, and this greatly increases RTT. Then your ACKs in response to downloaded content will take a long time to get through the queue and tell the server it's okay to send more data. You would have to have a truly tiny upload speed limit (like 0.01 Mbps) for the actual ACK throughput to…

Ah. What I posted is my assumption of what was going wrong. Buffer bloat makes sense. Thanks. I 'solved' it by going to a provider with more upstream (cable) then later fiber. Even without this issue the download speed wasn't very good for the price so leaving was an easy decision.

You could also use μTP for transfering the data to a rented server and then from there to wherever you need. That protocol is designed to fill the pipe as much as possible, i.e. never let it dry out, while bloating the buffer as little as possible, by basically doing minimum one-way ping measurements and then using a target delay that is choosen so that the minimum delay is never actually hit. it does slow down internet browsing though, so you have to be carefull if there are other users who like to complain. the bandwith is not affected and it does yield to tcp though.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#62

Post by s_kilk »

Reedx wrote: post #60

PS3 was even worse in my experience - PS4 was a big improvement, although still a lot slower than Xbox. However, with both PS4 and Xbox One it's amazingly slow to browse the stores and much of the dashboard. Anyone else experience that? It's so bad I feel like it must just be me... I avoid it as much as possible and definitely decreases the number of games I buy.

> it's amazingly slow to browse the stores and much of the dashboard

Same, my PS4 can take up to a few minutes to load store pages. And sometimes it just hangs, or times out, and I need to quit the app and try again. It's really not a good experience at all.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#63

Post by tinus_hn »

zeta0134 wrote: post #30
ShabbosGoy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the links and reading material. It's amazing how important the scheduler is in an OS. I'm no expert on OS-level programming, but couldn't they have just used a simple round robin scheduler?

In this case the scheduler isn't as much of a problem as the interrupt service routine, which by its very nature interrupts the normal thread-level scheduler to do some work with the hardware. Both the Network Interface Card (or wireless chip) and the Audio hardware generate interrupts for a variety of reasons. Network cards generate interrupts when data is finished sending or receiving. Audio hardware generally gene…

On Windows, like other modern operating systems, a driver is supposed to do only the minimum amount of work possible in the interrupt handler, to avoid this problem. The real work is supposed to happen later when it can be scheduled.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#64

Post by kuschku »

Spooky23 wrote: post #19
deelowe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people really have issues with bandwith limits on uploads? I've always heard the opposite. Is it P2P or more like torrent where there are multiple peers? That would make more sense. At the end of the day, isn't the switch and xbox faster at downloading? That's what really matters.

My network has multiple iOS devices, two computers and a bunch of appliance devices I also use voip. Maxing out the standard 3mb uplink is easy when photos sync or any number of other use cases.

3mb uplink? That’s... I’m sorry for you.

Maybe you can find another ISP, I’m in northern Germany and my ISP provides 100mbps down, 40mbps up via DSL.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#65

Post by ygra »

kec wrote: post #7
derefr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works well if both devices are on the same LAN. Like inside a corporate office. What organization has multiple XBOs, though? Game dev studios? Hospitals? It must be much rarer than the Win10 case.

college dorms

Don't those put everyone on a different VLAN? At least that was the case when I was in uni.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#66

Post by mjevans »

toast0 wrote: post #44
lossolo wrote: post #22

DNS based GEO load balancing/CDN's are wrong idea today. For example if you use DNS that has bad configuration or one that is not supplied by your ISP, then you could be routed to servers thousands km/miles from your location. Last time I've checked akamai used that flawed dns based system. What you want to use now is what for example cloudflare uses which is anycast IP. You just announce same IP class on multiple ro…

As with all things, there are tradeoffs. As you say, GEO DNS doesn't work very well when the authoritative server doesn't get enough information to give a good answer; for example, if all of a nationwide ISP uses the same pool of recursive DNS, and doesn't proved EDNS client subnet, the authoritative server will not get any signal about where in the country the users are. Or, if you use DNS servers in another country…

The DNS server is the wrong place to make that decision.

If there is a set of choices and a decision to make, letting the client choose would be the best option.

I think I'd start with a client shuffling the list of results and asking for small fragments of the dataset from each. Based on the latency, bandwidth detected, and the size of the requested data it would then pick the most optimal set of servers. This also allows for fallback in case servers are unresponsive.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#67

Post by lossolo »

toast0 wrote: post #44
lossolo wrote: post #22

DNS based GEO load balancing/CDN's are wrong idea today. For example if you use DNS that has bad configuration or one that is not supplied by your ISP, then you could be routed to servers thousands km/miles from your location. Last time I've checked akamai used that flawed dns based system. What you want to use now is what for example cloudflare uses which is anycast IP. You just announce same IP class on multiple ro…

As with all things, there are tradeoffs. As you say, GEO DNS doesn't work very well when the authoritative server doesn't get enough information to give a good answer; for example, if all of a nationwide ISP uses the same pool of recursive DNS, and doesn't proved EDNS client subnet, the authoritative server will not get any signal about where in the country the users are. Or, if you use DNS servers in another country…

> Anycast isn't perfect either though.

Sure, but it's better than DNS based solution.

> It may be more likely to get you a route with fewer hops, but that's not necessarily the lowest latency link. And if there's a congested link in the path, it's much harder to steer a portion of users, but not all to alternate servers.

This is also true for DNS based solution because of DNS caching. Smart networks will change routes before your DNS changes get propagated.

> Anyway, unless you have thousands of datacenters well distributed throughout the globe, a lot of people are going to have high latency to whatever server is chosen, and high latency and very small windows == poor throughput, regardless of how you get to a server.

Depends what's your definition of high latency. If you live on desert in Africa or some forgotten village in India, then you will always have high latency because no one will build a POP there.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#68

Post by ex3ndr »

g09980 wrote: post #36

Want to see something like this for (Apple's) App Store. Downloads are fast, but the App Store experience itself is so, so slow. Takes maybe five seconds to load search results or reviews even on a wi-fi connection.

Same with Google Play since day 0.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#70

Post by Systemic33 »

cm2187 wrote: post #47
ploxiln wrote: post #18

Reminds me of how Windows Vista's "Multimedia Class Scheduler Service" would put a low cap on network throughput if any sound was playing: http://www.zdnet.com/article/follow-up-playing-music-severel... Mark Russinovich justified it by explaining that the network interrupt routine was just too expensive to be able to guarantee no glitches in media playback, so it was limited to 10 packets per millisecond when any med…

Reminds me of Apple's Jim Reekes "engineers are retarded". https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C5d151lqJsA (The annecdote really starts at 2:30).

Haha, what a great video.

To some extent he's onto something. Sometimes you are in this zone when everything will work if you just do this one quick little hack, and then the hack ends up not getting replaced with a proper solution, and in the end you end up with a harddrive right next to a speaker >.<

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